Dr Ross Tapsell1
1Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Ross Tapsell is a researcher at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, specialising in Southeast Asian media, culture and society. He is the author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE and other publications in the Southeast Asian region.
Abstract:
Recent elections in Southeast Asia have seen big wins for neo-authoritarian leaders, at a time of democratic decline in the region. One reason for their election success is the rapidly shifting nature of professional election campaigning. The elections were notable for their innovative material created specifically for TikTok; professionally created kawaii or ‘cool’ popular culture content; the use of influencers and other ‘Key Opinion Leaders’; and even the use of new artificial intelligence tools. This paper investigates the emerging political economy around these ‘soft fake’ campaigns, including investigating the changing nature of public relations companies involved. I conclude that an election campaign in Southeast Asia is now increasingly driven by vast amounts of money toward professional PR firms whose main aim is to obfuscate and manipulate election discourse in order to achieve victory for their candidate. Many of these domestic Southeast Asian PR firms operate in the ‘shadows’ and are not publicly listed companies. Others span wider regional and international networks whose role is to utilise new technologies in order to sell their services globally. In Southeast Asia, their main role has been to ‘rebrand’ politicians who have long been linked to authoritarianism. The tactics employed, and the lack of transparency around them, are ultimately furthering the decline of democracy in Southeast Asia. These political economy around public relations firms and their new tactics need to be understood when developing concepts around digital authoritarianism.